


pick your bones dry

by quackingfish



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Bro, Dave is triggered by blood and metal sounds, Gen, Major Character Death for Bro dying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 09:14:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4257780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quackingfish/pseuds/quackingfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bro died a fucking hero, and you can’t even decide how you feel about it. You want to cry. You can’t. You’re almost relieved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pick your bones dry

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Unconditional Love- Against Me!  
> cw: serious discussion and unpacking of Dave's experiences of child abuse, mentioned blood, character death (ie: Bro), mention of Rose's alcohol issues

You can’t stop staring. Your eyes are starting to ache and your hands are shaking by your sides but fuck, you just can’t stop staring. Your eyes are probably going to bulge out of your head and explode, and woah, that image really does not help this situation, not at all.

The constant ticking and grinding of your land really isn’t helping either, but it’s not like you can move your arms to cover your ears, and besides, that has never helped before.

It especially isn’t going to help when your Bro is dead. You want to cry, but it’s not like you can do that either. All you can do is fucking stare, and you hate yourself even more for it.

Bro died a fucking hero, and you can’t even decide how you feel about it. You want to cry. You can’t. You’re almost relieved.

 

 

Later, much later, it turns out Bro being dead doesn’t bring you any relief at all. You know you didn’t fucking hallucinate his dead body. Everybody has confirmed he’s dead. You can’t help but think it’s another one of his tricks. He’s just gonna jump out of some dark corner on this bullshit meteor filled with dark corners and he’s gonna attack you and everything will be normal again.

That used to comfort you.

You’re so fucking scared.

You don’t want Bro to be secretly alive, and the thought alone terrifies the shit out of you. How the hell can you not want him alive? What kind of bullshit even is that, when he’s been your hero since day one?

You’ve been scared of him since day one.

It’s nothing specific, nothing all that serious, because for him to be blatantly- fuck, blatantly abusive would be too easy. He had practically lived to make your life goddamn impossible.

It scares you how angry you are sometimes. You’re like, the master at keeping your emotions in check, and you literally have no idea why this is ruining that for you.

Your cape is pretty good at muffling the bullshit noises coming from your mouth. You love your cape. You don’t think you love your Bro.

Nope, that is a total lie, you love your Bro. He’s your hero. It isn’t a lie that you wish he wasn’t. It’s funny, now you’re free from him you feel even more trapped- trapped by yourself and your bullshit childish bonds of attachment, to make it even worse.

 

 

You tell Karkat about your Bro one night, surrounded by cans and piles of chalk, because cans get sharp when they’re crushed, or some bullshit, and your hand got scratched. Only barely enough to make you bleed, but it’s not like it takes much to set you off these days.

You tell him everything. Hell, you aren’t really telling it to him, staring at the little library you’d just finished fixing and focusing on the way the fabric of your cape stretches when you pull at it.

It’s still really fucking huge for you. Somehow it’s easier to deal with the bullshit when you have an audience who you don’t really expect to respond. You can’t quite say the word abuse, but you manage to call Bro an asshole without choking, so you chalk that one up as a win.

It- you feel good, in the most fucked up twisted way possible, when you look up and see Karkat genuinely upset. You know trolls have some fucked up parent-monster thing, so even though it makes you want to curl up in a ball and never come back, like a dead rolly-polly, it’s like. Rose would probably say it’s validating, or some shit. You just feel like maybe you haven’t been fucking deluding yourself this whole time just because you can’t live up to how awesome your Bro was.

You don’t really know what Karkat says, but somehow his words stick in your mind, and you know they’ll resurface later, whenever you think about the shit Bro put you through. At least you’ll have some positive memories attached to him.

He doesn’t touch you, because you don’t tell him it’s okay. He does get you a Band-Aid and mentions the noise-cancelling headphones he made, and tells you how they’re stuffed in a part of the lab that probably isn’t reached by the hum of the alchemiters and the fucked up reproduction things.

You thank him. It’s still weird to thank somebody without it feeling like an admission of weakness. He agrees, and says he doesn’t think you’re weak. You echo him, and then add some bullshit about it being a knight class thing, as if that’s the only thing you have in common.

You both laugh, though, and you think you might want to cry a bit. Like, actually want to cry, rather than hitting things to stop yourself from crying. You can’t, not quite yet, but you want to. You want to get to the point where you can cry.

You don’t tell Karkat that. You’ve talked for a long ass time, and it probably won’t sound like such an accomplishment if you say it out loud.

 

 

On Christmas, you cry. You break down in sobs, right there in your room, with just one wall separating you from the others and their (slightly confused) party.

You feel guilty because you haven’t gotten Bro anything. You’re angry because you can't stop yourself from thinking about what you should get him. What he had liked. The things he’d gotten you. That one time when he’d gotten you the best gifts a six-year-old could ask for and it had only felt like he was punishing you by being nice. Like he was stepping down his game because you weren’t good enough.

Nobody knocks on your door, but Rose pesters you, sending a question mark and asking if you want her help with anything, and if you’re up for helping her work out how to make reindeer hats later.

You say yes to the hats, and it almost hurts that she’s treating you like glass, and fuck,it absolutely does hurt, but you’re still glad she’s doing it. That she cares enough to do that.

 

 

Self-therapy probably isn’t as effective, but you’re not sure you’re up to dealing with another person while you deal with your shit.

That doesn’t mean you’re not up for listening to Rose when she tells you why Vriska caught her surrounded by booze. Well, you’re not sure anyone can be up for hearing how a fourteen year old kid started getting blackout drunk to feel closer to her dead mother, but it’s Rose.

She’s your fucking sister.

That’s probably also why you’re bringing Bro up. That’s probably also why, even though your throat closes up and you feel like you’re being impaled through the chest a million times at once, you manage to get out that he abused you. That he was an abusive asshole, and you’re still not okay about it.

She asks before hugging you. You curl into her arms and fuck, there’s no way your body isn’t eroding away right now.

Rose tells you that people care about you, that she believes you, that they all believe you.

You tell her that you’ll get right to work on believing that.

You’re not okay, you tell her. You probably never will be.

She tells you that that’s fine, and that she just wants you to be happy, even if you can’t be okay.

You’re crying again now, but she is too, and, come to think of it, the only person here that you haven’t seen fucked up and bawling their eyes out is Gamzee, and he’s been living in a literal fridge for the last year.

Bro was an abusive dickweed, you’re simultaneously relieved and upset that he’s dead, you’re probably never going to have it together, and all of that is fucking fine, and anyone who says otherwise can take a shitty jpeg sword to the face.


End file.
